The Fractured Tower

Book 2, Chapter 27

Explaining what had just happened to them was going to be a burden, one Sorin wasn’t sure he wanted to take on. He was sure they’d all felt it but doubted any of them understood what it meant. For that matter, he wasn’t entirely confident he was right in his own guess. It was obvious what the tower seemed to be setting him up to do, and with that starting point, he’d come up with a hypothesis about what had changed.

“I don’t feel any stronger or faster,” Rue said once the light faded and the Antechamber came back into view. They’d never really left it, but he’d only been able to tell thanks to the soulprints that granted him extra senses.

“No, but I did feel more… ‘Solid’ is maybe the wrong word for it,” Odric said. He opened and closed his hands while he stared down at them. “Maybe I’m just imagining it. It doesn’t feel any different from normal now that the light’s gone.”

No one said anything for a few seconds after that, but they all turned expectant looks on Sorin. With a sigh, he said, “I’m guessing here, but it’s probably the same principle soulprints like Heat Resistance work on.”

“That’s so lame. You guys already have Heat Resistance, and it’s too late for the rest of us now that we’re done with that God-forsaken desert,” Rue said.

“Rue, please stop talking for a minute,” Nemari told her.

“It’s like that. It’s not Heat Resistance,” Sorin explained. “I think… It seems impossible, but I think the tower imbued us with Void Resistance, and not as a soulprint either. It’s just intrinsic to us now.”

“I’ve never heard of such a thing,” Yoru mused. “Void Resistance would be incredibly useful. Voidlings are one of the biggest threats, especially higher up.”

“There have been a lot of them lately,” Sorin agreed. “More than I’d expect on the early floors.”

“I don’t know about that. The only ones I’ve personally seen were the two that attacked us when we fought the portal guardian on Floor 1,” Yoru said. “But… still, Void Resistance would be a boon, if that’s what it really is. It’s hard to test.”

Sorin wasn’t about to go into the reasons why he thought he was right, not in front of the temporary teammates, but at this point, too many pieces of the puzzle were pointing toward the tower setting him up as its champion to fight back against the void. The idea that voidlings were something from outside the tower wasn’t new to Sorin; there’d been decades of speculation on how they provided no anima when slain, and how no one had ever discovered any soulprint ability that worked on them.

What he didn’t think anyone had ever considered was that they weren’t here with the tower’s blessing, that they were an infection on a massive scale. But Sorin’s mind kept flashing back to that display in the Antechamber on Floor 1, to the indigo tower that had little black lines running all throughout it.

What was it the witches told me? Calamity spreads, the darkening void encroaches, and the way becomes corrupted. Could the void actually be taking over the tower? And if it is, what happens to humanity once it wins? Sure would be nice if I could remember what the hell I found at the top of my old tower.

“The portal’s open,” Odric pointed out.

“Worst Antechamber ever,” Rue muttered.

Sorin disagreed. While not the immediate benefit of a powerful new soulprint or weapon like most people would expect, if he was right about the tower making his anima somehow resistant to the erosion of the void, that meant fights with voidlings were automatically a lot safer. Perhaps more importantly, it might mean he could leave the liminal path.

Does Samael have this, too? Is that how he got from his own path to mine? You’d need some sort of navigational ability so you don’t just get lost in the void, but in theory, it could work. If I could gain full immunity to the void, could I travel far enough to find the other towers? Does it even work that way?

He went through first, sword in hand and ready to handle the furious rush of whatever monster they landed on top of. Part of him wanted to say their luck couldn’t be so bad that it would happen again, but he couldn’t make himself believe that.

He emerged onto a grassy river bank and blessedly cool air. The water was clear and swift, and he easily spotted small fish darting around and river pebbles lining the bottom of the water. There were no monsters anywhere that he could see, not in the air or water, and not hidden under the ground.

Odric and Rue came through next, both immediately falling into a wary crouch and scanning the immediate area for threats. The other three came after, wary but not expecting to be pounced on before they could get their bearings.

When nothing emerged out of the far-off trees or swooped down from beyond the clouds, the tension slowly drained out of the team. “Well, I think that’s our best entry so far,” Sorin said. “Yoru must be a good luck charm.”

Their temporary teammate just gave him a flat look, then turned to start examining the horizon. Floor 4 either wasn’t locked to the same day-night cycle as the first three floors had been, or else it got very little sunlight, because it was evening here. Either that, or we lost way more time than I thought in the Antechamber. It only felt like we were in that light for a moment, but it could have been longer.

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“I think I know where we are,” Yoru announced after a minute of study. He pointed off at a misty dark silhouette to the north. It rose above the trees, but the outline painted a gentle, rolling hill more than a jagged, sharp-edged mountain. “That’s the Jumaiya.”

“What’s a Jumaiya?” Rue asked.

“Sort of a fountainhead for the south-flowing rivers of Floor 4. The closer you get to it, the more marshy everything gets. The strongest monsters are in the middle of the floor, but it’s travel that’s the real issue here. Without Water Walking, it becomes near impossible to navigate. Do any of you have it?”

Nobody raised their hand to that, which prompted an irritated grumble from Yoru. “I should have known. You’re basically fugitives now. Of course you wouldn’t have the one soulprint that’s essential for exploring this floor.”

Their original plan would have called for only Sorin to even be here, so he hadn’t worried much about securing copies of the expensive soulprint. Lorvaine hadn’t offered him one, though he expected that was more because it was part of her exclusive collection and not something on public display.

“I can freeze the water for us,” he offered to placate Yoru. “It might not be as fast, but it’ll get us to the portal hub. You know which way to go?”

“West, then north. The hub is about fifty miles west of the Jumaiya. Of course, between the monsters and the tower itself, nobody can build a bridge here. We’re going to have to cross a lot of water to reach it. The hub itself isn’t really that populated either, for much the same reason.”

“What about monsters?” Nemari asked.

“We can talk on the go,” Sorin said. “First task is to get across this river.”

That was easier said than done. Fast moving water did not like to be frozen, or rather, it did freeze, and then the chunks of ice were swept downstream before they could congeal into a solid bridge. Sorin had plenty of experience dealing with water currents, however, and he knew the trick of it.

“I need you to hold a pathway of water steady for me to freeze,” he told Nemari. “Just pick a spot and make a straight line to the opposite bank. I’ll do the rest.”

Yoru watched silently while they worked. It only took a minute for ice to start spreading across the stilled water, not because Sorin was using Still Winter, but just from free-casting an E-rank Freeze. Normally, it was an F-ranked soulprint, but he valued time over efficiency right now, so he powered a stronger version of it to speed up the effect.

Three minutes later, an ice bridge was anchored to both sides of the shore and half a foot thick. “There. Strong enough to hold our weight, but I wouldn’t test it against any monsters that might come swimming along. I suggest we move quickly.”

Odric took the lead; Nemari and Sorin came up at the end. They both kept the bridge stable with their magic, but once they were across, she let go of Water Bond. The current immediately started trying to pull the bridge free, and Sorin could tell it would only last a few minutes before breaking apart.

“You have Water Bond and Freeze,” Yoru said once they’d finished the crossing. He made it sound like an accusation more than a question.

Nemari bristled. “Yeah?”

Nodding to himself, Yoru said, “Good. You are not as unprepared for this floor as I thought. This is still going to be a slow hike though.”

“Maybe we’ll get lucky and get a few of them as we travel,” Sorin said. “I’m not sure if they’re expensive because they’re rare, or if it’s just that everybody wants one.”

“I would not expect to find one. They’re not exactly rare, but you have to know where to find them. Most monsters here are aquatic or amphibious. Only a few specific types actually walk atop the water, and there won’t be any between us and the portal hub.”

Yoru was a walking almanac of information, having extensively studied everything about the first ten floors. He cleared up the confusion about the time sync immediately—Floor 4 simply had shorter days and long periods of pre-dawn and dusk—and knew where the best farming spots were for all the popular and valuable soulprints.

They encountered their first monster about an hour into the walk, and he identified that instantly, too. It was some sort of plant creature with grasping fronds that had no hesitation about reaching out of the water to try to snag someone. If it had managed to surprise them, it probably could have pulled a victim into the water and drowned them, but Nemari’s ability to take control of water handily blocked the monster from even reaching them.

No one wanted to go diving down there to fight it, and it was too tough to actually be torn apart with just Water Bond, so they left it behind without hesitation. Sorin briefly considered killing it for the anima, but he didn’t want to reveal more than he had to around Yoru and Vendis without good reason.

Their second encounter was a trio of bone snappers that erupted out from under the river bank and flopped onto the ice bridge. Their long necks shot out too fast to see unaided, and only Yoru’s timely intervention saved Vendis from losing a chunk of his calf when the lead snapper’s beak tried to close around his leg.

The group’s combined firepower quickly ended the threat, but the corpses slipped back into the water before anyone could consider grabbing them to harvest materials. That was a bit of a shame, because bone snapper meat was rather tasty, in Sorin’s opinion. He’d have taken half an hour to carve the monsters up, but the currents had already swept the first two away by the time they killed the final one, and Yoru kicked that one back into the water the moment it died.

“We should look for a place to camp soon, preferably somewhere as far away from water as possible,” Yoru said. “It’s only going to get colder and wetter as the night goes on, and fires draw in monsters, so it’s going to be a miserable night.”

“There are some hills over that way. Monsters having to climb up to get to us would at least give us some warning,” Sorin said.

“How can you tell with the fog coming in?” Rue asked.

Sorin ignored the question and flicked his eyes toward Yoru and Vendis. “Call it six hours, and we’ll do two-hour watches in groups of two. I don’t think I care for this floor any more than I did Floor 3, and I’m eager to get past it as soon as possible.”

They settled into camp in a small stand of trees while strands of mist curled around them. True to Yoru’s prediction, it was wet and miserable. He and Vendis were quite comfortable in water-sealed sleeping bags, but the rest of the team suffered from their lack of preparation.

Much as Sorin wanted to stay awake the night through, even he had limits. He’d been getting barely more than a few hours here or there for weeks now, and light dozing turned into true sleep for the first time since Floor 1.

He dreamed of dark corridors, the walls shifting and faces appearing in the bricks, only to vanish when he looked at them. Hissing laughter chased him down the halls, somehow familiar and haunting at the same time. Somehow, he knew that the rest of his team—his real team, from the blue tower—were lost in the labyrinth, and that he had to find them before whatever else was in there did first.

Sorin woke feeling worse than before he’d fallen asleep and took his place in the middle watch with Vendis. Neither spoke, and when their turn was done, he sat down with his back against a tree and his sword in his hand. He didn’t fall back asleep again.